In the stories I write for my series of books called Tales of Forgotten Ages, I try to avoid a device I call "literary voyeurism". Teens and young adults get bombarded with enough sex and sexualized themes every day. I do not want to contribute to this assault on young impressionable minds. Am I shooting myself in the foot? After all, sex sells so they say.

Looking back over the many fantasy books I have read by authors such as R. A. Salvatore, J. R. R. Tolkien, Terry Goodkind, C. S. Lewis, Robert Jordan, and many others, I do not recall any scenes of what could be termed 'gratuitous sex'. Don't get me wrong...there are characters in my stories who would gladly participate in such activities and worse, but I do not write explicit scenes where this occurs. Would it help to sell books if they were included? Maybe...maybe not. I know a lot of my friends would be shocked and put off by such content, as would the parents of many strangers who would then never buy anything else I wrote. Suffice it to say that the authors I respect in my genre have not felt the need to engage in "literary voyeurism" and I intend to follow their well-proven example.

That being said, I do believe that horrific scenes involving the sexual degradation of someone can be a powerful way of depicting the unmitigated evilness of a character or group of characters. A good friend has written such a book. Yes, it was hard to read such a terrible scene, fictional though it was, but it left no doubt as to the utter depravity of the perpetrators. One reviewer termed it 'lightning in a bottle'...an apt description since I was thunderstruck by the intense feelings of disgust I felt for the characters who participated in the atrocity. My friend's name is B. Y. Rogers and his book is The Sin of Certainty. Although it is not YA Fantasy, but a social commentary, I highly recommend it.